VMworld 2016 – Day 2 – General Session

Day 2 of VMworld 2016 was kicked off with the another General Session.

The opening act was a Blues Band, which were very cool and happened to have Sanjay Poonen (@spoonen) as the piano player. Totally unexpected surprise, but what an awesome way to start a keynote!

The EUC focused keynote started off with Sanjay Poonen providing an overview of the VMware Vision for Digital Transformation. In essence, the Any Device, Any Application part of the VMware One Cloud Vision which has been a focal point for the last few years. Which Sanjay suggested that Digital Transformation would be the fourth industrial revolution.

Inevitably Sanjay went on to talk about VMware’s awesome EUC Offering, WorkSpaceONE and digitalization of the end user experience.

Highlighting the fact that VMware understands that IT is still based on three types of architectures: Windows client/server, Web and Mobile and acknowledging there is more than one type of end user device (Apple, Google and Microsoft) VMware believes that WorkSpaceONE can be used as an agnostic solution to provide connectivity to all of those back end systems on any device using a cloud-first approach.

Sanjay then went on to talk about the benefits of the WorkspaceONE vision and its Consumer Simple, Enterprise Secure approach to the digital workspace and then highlighted that WorkspaceONE split is into 3 core technology categories: Identity,Desktop/Mobile and Management and Security.

We then saw a customer video showing how the features of WorkspaceONE (AirWatch and View) are helping deliver real customer benefits.

Sanjay then talked about how VMware are continuing to innovate, specifically highlighting their partnership with IBM. On the innovation front, Sanjay introduced the fact that Microsoft Skype for Business will now be available within the VMware View VDI solution.

Sanjay then went on to talk about Mobility and VMware Airwatch and their Identity Management first approach which has enabled them to gain the “Gold Medal” from the IDC showing significant YoY growth within the Enterprise Mobility Leadership space. As well as Gartner making VMware Airwatch the “undisputed leader” of execution and vision within the Enterprise Mobility Management Suites Magic Quadrant.

Sanjay then went on to talk about the need for Management and Security and how WorkSpaceONE enables a TOC reduction of up to 30% against Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)for WIndows 10. WorkSpaceONE features such as Conditional Access as well as Microsegmentation and VMware TrustPoint make this possible.

Ray O’Farrell (@ray_ofarrell), VMware Executive VP and CTO was then introduced and he talked more about the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). Ray highlighted the challenges that business face when going through Digital Transformation, including increased complexity, new cybersecurity threats and the ability to support both existing and new applications/services.

Ray then went on to talk about the benefits of vSphere 6.5 (#html5client), vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 (#migrate2vcsa) and vCloud Air Network before introducing Yanbing Li (@ybhighheels) Senior VP and General Manager, Storage and Availability.

Yanbing Li talked about how VMware have been driving innovation with HCI and vSAN in 3 key areas, integration, management and workloads.

Yanbing then handed the baton over to Rajiv Ramaswami, Executive VP and General Manager, Networking and Security to talk about VMware NSX. Rajiv talked about how the challenges that customers face today, including Security, Automation and Application Continuity and how VMware are enabling customers to transition to VMware NSX and the VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture.

Finally closing out the General Session, Rajiv handed over to Kit Colbert (@kitcolbert), CTO for Cloud Platforms who talked about Containers covering VMware Photon and VMware vSphere Integrated Containers and how VMware are supporting the vision of tomorrow.